Timely, angry, masterly Le Carre

THE FIRST recognizable English-language novels of espionage were published in the first decade of the 20th century -- and both have been continuously in print ever since.

Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim” came out in 1901, and Erskine Childers’ “The Riddle of the Sands” followed two years later. You still can get a fairly spirited argument over which actually is the first true spy novel. (This reader inclines toward Childers’ case, but it’s really a bar stool sort of dispute, the kind that you keep going mainly as an excuse to order another pint.) The real point is that both were recognized, from the start, as works of literature, and as entertainments. No less severe a critic than the late Edward Said referred to “Kim” as a “hugely embarrassing” and yet “wondrous” novel. “The Riddle of the Sands” was picked in an English newspaper poll not long ago as the 37th best novel of the last century. Many people believe its descriptions of sailing are the finest ever written.

In both cases, the authors seized the opportunity to express an urgent social and political realism in tales of things ordinarily hidden from view. At mid-century, Graham Greene magnificently exploited the possibilities inherent in the porous membrane between the espionage genre and the novel of political criticism. But no author has made better use of that literary passage than John le Carre, beginning with “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold” in 1963.

“A Most Wanted Man” is his 21st novel and surely one of his best -- intricately plotted, beautifully written, propulsive, morally engaged, but timely as today’s headlines. It’s also a very angry book in ways that may discomfort some American readers. In a recent memoir of incidents from his own six-year service in British intelligence, Le Carre, now 76, writes of “the madness of spies” and the way in which their occupational delusions infect the body politic. “A Most Wanted Man” is an exploration of the murkily ambiguous and morally turbulent waters in which America’s spies -- with their extraordinary renditions, torture and clandestine unilateralism -- now fish.

Hamburg setting

Part of what makes this new book such enjoyably compelling reading is Le Carre’s return to two landscapes he knows so well. One is the moral geography of contemporary espionage in which means and ends, loyalty and patriotism are obscured by necessity and deceit. The other is the ancient Hanseatic seaport of Hamburg, most Anglophilic of German cities, where Le Carre -- under his real name, David Cornwell -- once served under diplomatic cover. (The author’s most memorable character, British spymaster George Smiley, spent part of his boyhood in Hamburg.)

This Hamburg, however, is very much a post-9/11 city. On the one hand, the collapse of communism has allowed the north German port to resume its historic role as meeting place of polyglot Middle Europe and the West. On the other hand, deadly new antagonisms between religions and cultures have turned it into a shadowy but deadly battlefield. Here, the German-born son, Melik, of a Turkish immigrant mother, reflects on their adopted city:

“Leyla and Melik scarcely ever went to mosque, not even a moderate Turkish-language one. Since 9/11, Hamburg’s mosques had become dangerous places. Go to the wrong one, or the right one and get the wrong imam, and you could find yourself and your family on a police watch list for the rest of your life. Nobody doubted that practically every prayer row contained an informant who was earning his way with the authorities. Nobody was likely to forget . . . that the city- state of Hamburg had been unwitting host to three of the 9/11 hijackers, not to mention their fellow cell-members and plotters; or that Mohammad Atta, who steered the first plane into the Twin Towers, had worshiped his wrathful god in a humble Hamburg mosque.”

Follow the money

Into this tense metropolis comes Issa Karpov, illegitimate son of a Russian father and a Chechen mother. He may or may not be a terrorist -- or a sympathizer or perhaps even a funder of terrorists. He’s definitely Muslim and an illegal immigrant: He escaped from a Turkish prison and a Swedish holding cell. He’s come to Hamburg for something other than refuge. His father, now dead, spied for the British and the now-laundered million he earned for his betrayal is on deposit with a private British banking house operating out of the German city. Its proprietor, Tommy Brue, has his own secrets, mainly centering on the secret “Lipizzaner accounts” (named for the famous horses of Vienna’s Spanish Riding Academy, which are born black and turn white as they mature) that his late father had set up at the behest of British intelligence. The successful money-laundering operation earned the father royal honors, an OBE, and the son a guilty conscience, since the whole operation was illegal and still hangs like a cloud over the bank he inherited.

Brue is approached on Issa’s behalf by Annabel Richter, a human rights lawyer working for a refugee group. She sees in Issa, who claims to want nothing more than a medical school education and a place to pray, a chance to make amends for all the clients she’s failed. Brue hopes he sees something more in her. Issa, meanwhile, has been spotted by three different intelligence agencies -- the Brits with an eye on their investment, the Americans eager to scoop up any suspected terrorist and the Germans (still smarting over their failure to spot the Hamburg 9/11 cells) whose leader, Gunther Bachmann, is the novel’s most memorable personality. He heads the local security operation and hopes to use Issa to compromise an ostensibly moderate local imam suspected of funneling money to jihadists.

Deft portraits

Even the minor characters in “A Most Wanted Man” are deftly sketched, but all three of the protagonists are brilliantly drawn. Here, for example, is Bachmann’s introduction:

“If there ever are people in the world for whom espionage was ever the only possible calling, Bachmann was such a person. The polyglot offspring of a string of mixed marriages contracted by a flamboyant German-Ukrainian woman, and reputedly the only officer of his service not to possess an academic qualification beyond summary expulsion from his secondary school, Bachmann had by the age of thirty run away to sea, trekked the Hindu Kush, been imprisoned in Colombia and written a thousand-page unpublishable novel.”

And here is how Melik -- the good-hearted Turkish boxer -- first spots Issa Karpov, the ambiguous character at the story’s heart: “Melik felt someone’s gaze on him, glanced round and came face-to-face with a tall, desperately thin boy of his own height with a straggly beard, eyes reddened and deep-set, and a long black coat that could have held three magicians. He had a black-and-white kaffiyeh round his neck and a tourist’s camel-skin saddlebag slung over his shoulder. He stared at Melik . . . never blinking, but appealing to him with his fiery sunken eyes. . . . It was the skinny boy’s stillness he decided later. Those lines of age in a face as young as mine. His look of winter on a lovely spring day.”

Brue, the banker, enters the narrative thus: “Tommy Brue, salt of the earth, good man on a dark night, no highflier but all the better for it, first-rate wife, marvelous value at the dinner table and plays a decent game of golf. Or so the word went, he believed, and so it should.”

Sitting in a hotel lobby, he first glimpses the lawyer, Annabel, coming in from the Baltic rain: “Out of it, like the sole survivor of an avalanche, stepped a small, stocky figure in shapeless clothes and a scarf wound round her head and neck. For an appalled moment Brue fancied she had slung a child across her shoulders, until he realized it was a man-sized rucksack. . . . No makeup, not a square inch of flesh from the throat down, Brue recorded as he rose to greet her. Firm, fluid movement of a small capable body inside the frumpish gear. A bit martial, but women these days were. Round spectacles, frameless, catching the chandeliers. No blink rate. Child’s skin. . . . A choirboy face to go with the choirboy voice. No visible accomplice. Navy blue jeans, army boots. A pocket beauty in disguise.”

Each of these characters has his or her reasons and secrets, and Le Carre skillfully intertwines them in a narrative conclusion that is no less haunting and enraging for all its seeming inevitability. Suffice to say, it turns on events that ought to be an issue in next month’s election.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com